GRIM REGIME: A special report.; For Burmese, Repression, AIDS and Denial

By BLAINE HARDEN

Published: November 14, 2000

Correction Appended

YANGON, Myanmar—
To inoculate themselves against any outbreak of democracy, the generals who run this hermit dictatorship have undertaken two urgent missions of self-preservation.

Seeking support from the Buddhist majority in what used to be called Burma, the junta is sprucing up old pagodas and building new ones at a pace and on a scale that experts say is without precedent.

Nearly every day, a top general travels by armed motorcade to a recently restored pagoda. As state television records his piety, the general removes his shiny shoes and inspects a newly gilded Buddha.

The junta has a rather more robust Plan B. In an autumn that has been unkind to autocrats -- Slobodan Milosevic failed to steal an election in Serbia and the youngest son of Indonesia's ousted president, Suharto, was convicted of corruption -- the generals here are taking no chances. They have locked up nearly all their political opponents.

In late September, they again ordered the house arrest of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader whose party won a huge victory in a 1990 election that the generals ignored. Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, has spent more than 6 of the last 11 years under house arrest.

Senior leaders of her party have been imprisoned or placed under house arrest. Two of the most influential monks, who wrote letters that begged the generals to talk to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, are being watched by military intelligence.

The army halted huge pro-democracy demonstrations 12 years ago by killing several hundred people and jailing thousands more. Since then, the generals have doubled the size of the armed forces, to more than 400,000, though Myanmar, with a population estimated at 50 million, faces no serious foreign threat and has made peace with most of its armed ethnic minorities.

Military analysts say the buildup, which coincides with a steep decline in spending on schools and health care, is primarily aimed at preventing or, if need be, crushing civil unrest. Large numbers of troops are stationed in or around major cities.

In the last five years, the junta has forcibly resettled tens of thousands of potentially restive poor people from city centers to distant slums. It has closed most urban universities and sent students off to remote rural campuses. Labor unions and private civic associations are banned. No elections are scheduled; none seem likely.

The generals have made it a crime to own a computer modem, send e-mail, sign on to the Internet or invite a foreigner into a private home.

Since seizing power 38 years ago, the military dictatorship has renamed the country, renamed this capital (formerly Rangoon) and renamed scores of other cities, towns and religious shrines. Every few years, the generals rename themselves.

After the 1988 retirement of the founding dictator, Gen. Ne Win, his handpicked successors decided to call their junta the State Law and Order Restoration Council, known inside and outside the country as Slorc. In 1997, as the generals opened the country to foreign investors and tried to soften their image, the name was changed to the State Peace and Development Council.

S.P.D.C., though, has not caught on. People seem to relish calling their self-appointed leaders ''Slorc.''

The generals have also stopped allowing foreign journalists into the country, especially Americans. But Slorc, starved for foreign currency, began admitting sizable numbers of tourists after 1996, which it proclaimed ''Visit Myanmar Year.''

This reporter visited the country in late October and early November as a tourist after the Myanmar authorities had failed for nearly five years to grant journalist visas requested by The New York Times. Citizens can go to prison here for talking to foreign reporters. For that reason, this article omits the names and blurs the identities of people who were willing to explain what life is like in a nation studded with giant green billboards that warn, ''Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy.''

In Jail, Fried Rat Is a Delicacy

A former political detainee had been in prison for about six years when a cellmate told him about ''Visit Myanmar Year.'' On hearing the news, he remembers laughing for hours in his prison cell. ''We said that if any foreigner visits our cell for one night, then he will know the real Burma,'' he said.

He is in his 40's and was arrested by military intelligence for associating with a banned political party. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison at a secret trial where there were no civilian witnesses. He did not have a lawyer.

Human rights groups say his experience is typical. There are about 1,400 political prisoners in Myanmar, according to an American Embassy count.

The former prisoner's incarceration began when guards forced a stinking blue cotton bag over his head and asked him questions for four days without allowing him to sleep. He said the bag, which kept him from seeing the faces of his changing cast of interrogators, was fouled with sweat, mucous and blood.

''It smelled very awful,'' he said, ''so bad you can't even imagine it.''

Correction: November 15, 2000, Wednesday Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about life in Myanmar misstated the length of time since the authorities there have granted a journalist visa requested by The New York Times. Such a visa was granted in the spring of 1998; it has not been nearly five years that the authorities have refused to grant one.